Johanna's Heiresses

This essay reads the portrayals of women protagonists on Dylan’s 1980s records for the ways in which they intersect with, are inscribed within, and depart from, the lineages of his iconic female figures of the 1960s and 1970s: Johanna, Isis, Queen Jane, and the unnamed heroines of ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,’ ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ and ‘Like A Rolling Stone.’ The essay focuses on three tracks from three different mid-1980s albums, ‘Sweetheart Like You’ (Infidels, 1983), ‘Tight Connection to My Heart’ (Empire Burlesque, 1985), and ‘Brownsville Girl’ (Knocked Out Loaded, 1986), songs of high drama and romance, adventure and travel, proximate violence and immanent disappearance, gritty, sometimes seedy scenarios in which the very existence of the respective speakers seems predicated on the precarious relationships that transpire or have transpired between them and the women characters about whom they sing. Drawing on Marcel Proust’s notions of writing as a process of composite creation and of translation of ‘that which already exists within each of us,’ (In Search of Lost Time Vol. 6: Finding Time Again, p. 199), the essay examines the ways in which ‘sweetheart,’ ‘Brownsville girl’ and her successor, and the nameless ‘you’ of ‘Tight Connection’ are composed in relation to Dylan’s past women protagonists, and reflects on the evolution of his storytelling by the mid-1980s.